School Night
by Whyagain
Summary: "She thinks about tides and rocks and starlight, about the alluvium of her life." -DSR-


**Title:** School Night  
**Author: **Whyagain**  
****Rating:** T or PG-13 for language and adult situations**  
****Classification****: **Vignette  
**Pairing: **DSR  
**Timeline: **S8  
**Disclaimer:** Not mine. No money.

**A/N: **In an attempt to stop myself from spewing DSR all over my other story, this happened. If there's any interest, I would consider a polish and actually writing a plot somewhere in here, but it is only largely a tool for the sake of my sanity. The title comes from the brilliant Ani Difranco song of the same name, my own personal theme song for DSR. I feel as though there was a fic by the same title back in the day, also DSR, but I cannot find it. If anyone knows the author or a site where I can find it, please drop me a line. No plagiarism or disrespect meant; I was a big fan of that work.

* * *

She's started leaving pieces of herself behind.

Just small reminders, tokens, whispers of things she should offer but can't. Things that were gone years, lifetimes before she met him. She wonders if he notices what they really are, wonders if he knows what she means.

She's always had her own space, kept separate from the drudge and toil of the work. When she started spending nights with Mulder, she would retreat before the sun rose. Mulder and the work were irrevocably intertwined. They could come visit. They could leave shards of themselves - a file, a belt, a pile of damp seed hulls - scattered about like so many jagged edges, but they couldn't stay.

But she tours his house, full of the pictures and awards and bits of wood and metal that define a lifetime he'll never tell her about because she'll never have the courage to ask, and she wants there to be some record of her stay in his life, too.

So she leaves a T-shirt, a bar of her favorite soap, an old movie. A tube of chapstick, a hastily thumbed medical journal, a sweater.

But he deposits her offerings laundered and folded on the end table beside the front door next to the ceramic dish he uses for his keys and loose change. He knows which things belong.

And which don't.

xxxxx

She pulls his hands off of the swell of her stomach, settling them on her shoulders, in her hair, on her breasts. She feels the pads of his fingers slip along her back, tracing the beads of sweat like a roadmap to her center. She groans and shifts, trying to increase their pace.

Want me, she thinks. Use me.

But he moves her easily, as if she's a leaf and he the wind. As if she's something precious he won't let fall to the ground and become lost in the dull pile of more unfortunate petals. As if she hasn't damned them both.

As if this isn't her habit.

Of all the men she's taken into her orbit, of all the lovers she's ended up breaking, she's tried least hard with him. She's spent the least amount of time resisting her desire for the one man who deserves it most. Who deserves to be free of this strange life, free of her.

She crests, a curse tumbling from her lips, and stills. She's not sure if he came. He smiles and she realizes he doesn't care.

A tear sneaks out of her emotional lockbox and down her cheek.

xxxxx

He's considerate in ways she never thought she liked and ways she always knew she appreciated.

He closes both sets of toilet lids before flushing, squeezes the toothpaste from the bottom and cleans the speckles of water off the mirror. He doesn't hang in the open refrigerator while deciding what to eat. If something is empty, he throws it out instead of replacing the carton. He pays attention to things like expiry dates and keeps his pantry stocked with honest-to-gosh food.

He never calls past ten and never just to say hi.

He never uses three pots when one will suffice and never leaves water in the sponge. He never undresses as he wanders through the house, never leaves a trail of clothing from the front door to the bathroom. He never replaces movies in the wrong sleeves and never without rewinding them first.

He always reaches for her luggage and jogs a few paces in front of her to open doors.

She knows his habits are remnants of his other life, the life he would be leading if the fates were less cruel. The life he would rather be living. She knows he would do them for anyone, not just for her. Because he is kind. Because he is good. Because he is a man in the service of others by choice.

He scrambles her eggs well.

She doubts Mulder even knew she liked eggs. A usual breakfast with Mulder was a cup of dredgy coffee and some non-fat, non-carb, non-taste, non-cream cheese concoction spread hastily onto dry wheat. But for the first and probably last time in her adult life she can eat whatever she wants and by God is she going to make use of it.

She always cleans her plate when he cooks.

xxxxx

He's not the sort of man she's attracted to. He's granite, and she prefers marble. She prefers the polish and shine, the yield and heft. She's bewitched by the swirls and veins of the stone, more so because they were once imperfections in the rock, metaphorasized and crystallized, hardened into elegance. She appreciates the artistry of the thing.

But he is solid, hard and impossibly strong, forged from the fires at the center of earth. Only a deft hand and equally strong tool could carve such stone. She doesn't have the patience or the skill, and she likes the rough quartz edges, wishes he would cut her from time to time.

She would deserve it.

But he's only a pillar, always a pillar. Never a mirrored surface in which to catch a faint reflection of herself. Never a decorative vase or an intricately moulded column. But a wall, a monument. A stone among many. Quarried, placed and forgotten, blending into a grander structure. Beauty in permanence, in timelessness.

She wants to ask him what element he sees in her, which geology explains her. Sedimentary, igneous, metamorphic. Which tectonics define her relationships. If there's a science behind her choices.

But he'd never understand the question. He's not a profiler. They're alike that way.

xxxxx

He doesn't ask her to stay, doesn't ask her to come. He's never asked for more time or for less. He's never forced her to follow his lead or refused to follow hers. He's never made one demand.

Except for her honesty.

It's not a give and take, not the ebb and flow of her partnership with Mulder. It's more akin to the sea crashing against the rocky cliffside, neither understanding how one could be so solid and the other so fluid, but still they meet and meet again, sliding against one another until the storm subsides and she's pulled back into the tide.

And she can't even give him honesty. She can't tell him she sleeps with Mulder's shirt and keeps a bottle of his aftershave in her medicine cabinet. She can't tell him she crawls into his bed to alleviate the ache in her soul. She can't tell him that her dreams are all about her lost partner and not one is about the partner beside her.

Because when she says partner, she only means one man.

So they sit in mutual muteness. She thinks about tides and rocks and starlight, about the alluvium of her life. How her barren plains of skepticism were made fertile, made breeding grounds for the oddities of the imagination. How the currents of experience rearranged her silt and soil, heaping layer upon layer onto her banks.

Maybe he thinks about those things, too. He never tells her.

She misses low hum of her partner's continuous conversation, their intellectual thrusts and parries, misses the noise sometimes more than the content. So she plays too much music, hoping the strings and chords of a full set orchestra will beat back the silence.

And even though he calls her 'agent,' listens to her theories and trusts her weapon at his back, he's always seen her as a woman first. For a man of his character, woman holds a different classification than person, than officer or soldier. Partner. And she can't separate herself anymore. The waters amalgamated her too well.

xxxxx

She's standing at the door and trailing a ghostly touch across the most recent pile of her belongings when he emerges from the kitchen, wringing his hands in a dishtowel. Her eyes swing up to meet his.

"You okay?" he asks, draping the cloth over his shoulder in one fluid motion. She hears the soft thu-ack of the towel against his trapezius muscle. "Somethin' missin'?"

Yes. Something is missing. The simplicity of two people, unburdened by terrors and monsters and her lost partner, is missing.

And she waivers because the question is wrong. She already knows what is absent and why. She wants to know if she is a harlot for seeking his comfort, if he damns her for mistreating him. She wants to know if she is a coward for not offering him everything.

She gathers up the pieces of herself and tightens the tourniquet around her heart a little more.

"Everything's here." She pierces him with a gaze she knows he hasn't learned to interpret. "Right here."

* * *

_whyagain august 2012 _

* * *

But I stand committed  
To a love that came before you  
And the fact that I adore you  
Is but one of my truths.

-_School Night, _Ani Difranco


End file.
